One of many by means of traces in Grease, the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical, is the squelching of chewing gum. Members of the Pink Women, a rebellious clique of high-school ladies, repeatedly seem on-screen both smoking cigarettes or chewing the confectionery. Within the movie, gum identifies the rule breakers: It was so core to Grease {that a} manufacturing designer claimed that he ordered 100,000 sticks for the actors. After the film’s launch, Topps reportedly paid $1 million to function Travolta and Newton-John on buying and selling playing cards offered with packs of bubblegum.
Grease arrived when gum was a part of the picture of a brand new sort of late-’70s teen insurgent: a slick excessive schooler who dons leather-based jackets, smokes cigarettes, talks overtly about intercourse, and masticates ceaselessly. Within the second half of the twentieth century, gum additionally served as a outstanding signifier for grit or sexuality in movies like On the Waterfront and Fairly Lady, the place its presence conveyed that Marlon Brando’s and Julia Roberts’s characters, respectively, didn’t conform to social requirements. In latest instances, nonetheless, folks have been chewing much less. From 2009 to 2015, retailer gross sales dropped about 4.7 p.c a 12 months in North America. The pandemic then intensified that development: In the present day, general gum gross sales are nonetheless down about 32 p.c from 2018, in line with information supplied by the consumer-research agency Circana. Tellingly, Wrigley closed one in all its gum factories in 2016, and late final 12 months, Mondelez offered off its gum companies (which included Trident and Dentyne) within the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
On one degree, the decline of chewing gum is simply one other knockdown impact of the pandemic. Folks chew gum once they come into shut contact with others, Dan Sadler, a principal at Circana who research confectionary merchandise, instructed me—so fewer folks going into workplaces meant fewer folks munching on the product. On the identical time, e-commerce has proved robust for the business. Gum purchases have a tendency to start out from the identical psychological house as a seize for a Package Kat bar: You don’t actually want it however would possibly lack the willpower to refuse when it’s in entrance of you within the checkout line, particularly at a low price. Folks simply don’t store for gum that method on the web—today, solely 2 p.c of gum’s unit gross sales occur on-line, in line with Circana.
However I think for the chewing-gum enterprise, the issue goes deeper than all that. Gum has additionally misplaced a sure cultural cachet. In a earlier technology of movies, the product was a bit edgy. But as we speak’s standard tradition has new symbols of sweet sixteen insubordination—and, maybe extra necessary, it has fewer common symbols of insurrection general.
Chewing gum is an historical follow, and its affiliation with subversion predates Travolta, Brando, and Roberts by not less than a number of hundred years. Within the sixteenth century, the Aztecs chewed chicle, a resin sourced from sapodilla bushes that turned the inspiration for contemporary chewing gum. Nonetheless, they frowned upon this follow: To the Aztecs, chewing gum typically connoted promoting intercourse, Jennifer P. Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity College who wrote a e book concerning the historical past of gum, instructed me. On reflection, it’s a little bit of a head-scratching connection, however Mathews speculated that it had one thing to do with the lewdness of mouth actions when chewing.
Regardless of the genesis of gum’s associations with sexuality, when the behavior first gained traction within the U.S. within the late nineteenth century, these connotations survived. After founding his eponymous firm in 1898, William Wrigley Jr. turned to newspapers, streetcars, and billboards to promote his gum. Many had been deliberately suggestive: Wrigley ran adverts in ladies’s magazines that includes fashions in solely their bras and saying that double-mint chewing gum might erase “all these laborious, tense traces so devastating to the tender contours of face and neck.” His company rival, American Chicle, employed scores of engaging “sampling ladies” who fanned out throughout U.S. cities and gave away hundreds of sticks of gum. By the point the product unfold to Europe throughout World Struggle I, its status was cemented. Older Europeans understood gum as “this soiled American behavior,” Mathews instructed me.
Gum-related anxieties weren’t distinctive to Europe—they usually targeted not simply on sexuality, but additionally on the overall distaste for seeing somebody’s open mouth. By the center of the twentieth century, faculties within the U.S. and the U.Okay. started banning college students from chewing gum. The etiquette specialist Emily Publish lamented in a 1935 column that she discovered it “unattainable to think about a girl as strolling in a metropolis road and both chewing gum or smoking.” When requested about her opposition to chewing gum, she defined: “It makes an unsightly face and an annoying noise.” One other newspaper columnist, Inez Robb, puzzled if it wouldn’t be doable “to arrange for gum-chewers a compassionate group much like Alcoholics Nameless” to interrupt their “noxious behavior.” Robb underscored her disgust for watching folks’s “jaws wagging” as they chewed.
Gum’s reference to subversion ultimately made its solution to Hollywood. Maybe one purpose was that utilizing chewing gum to represent a personality’s brash sexuality was much less controversial than depicting intercourse on-screen. Till 1968, the Hays Code, which ruled Hollywood movies, outright banned “suggestive nudity,” and intercourse remained fleeting in teen films even after the code’s demise, partially out of behavior. For film producers, chewing gum was a handy image of insurrection that wasn’t truly that scandalous, Stephen Tropiano, a screen-studies professor at Ithaca School who wrote a e book on the historical past of sweet sixteen movies, speculates. “Teen films communicate a shorthand,” Tropiano instructed me. “They enlarge issues and overemphasize issues”—like gum chewing—“that [were] all the time seen as a logo of insurrection.” The nexus of disapproval from well mannered society with glamorization within the films might solely imply one factor: Gum turned cool. This carried right through to the ’90s: In Clueless, Alicia Silverstone’s character, Cher, who has a Valley woman accent and a closetful of pricy garments, pulls out a wad of gum and holds it between her fingers whereas delivering a speech.
In the present day, in an period when intercourse and gore are throughout streaming providers, chewing gum feels much less taboo. Plus, each technology has its personal symbols of insurrection: Vaping, as an example, might need supplanted cigarettes in popular culture. However even the notion of what constitutes a rebellious act as we speak could have gotten extra diffuse. As media have turn out to be algorithmically personalised due to TikTok and Netflix, “I wouldn’t say there’s a logo that everybody might have a look at and browse it the identical method they used to,” Susannah Stern, a communications professor on the College of San Diego, instructed me. Consuming is seen as mainstream, if not altogether undesirable, and frank discussions of intercourse or sexual identification should not significantly surprising.
Rise up in fact nonetheless exists, however folks have so some ways to precise it now. In consequence, what feels edgy to at least one particular person can simply be bland to a different. Billie Eilish, a mainstream heir of emo and goth subcultures, rocked inexperienced hair for years. It didn’t learn as that outrageous; oddly, Eilish generated media consideration when she dyed her hair a extra typical blond. Painted nails on males was once a transparent image of queerness. Now straight, cis, male rappers and actors have embraced nail polish, maybe seeing it as edgy. In a way, then, the decline of gum is likely to be one facet impact of the trendy smorgasbord of identities. There isn’t any one solution to be; thus, there isn’t any one solution to insurgent. On this tradition, our outdated symbols of boundary-pushing merely don’t have the ability they used to.
